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Kingfisher Airlines Cuts Flights, Citing Labor Unrest

NEW DELHI - Kingfisher Airlines of India said it had canceled several flights Monday because of employee unrest, a fresh blow to the ailing carrier that sent its share price down by the daily limit of 5 percent.

Many of its employees were unlikely to report for work after threats from other workers, said Kingfisher, which is owned by the billionaire Vijay Mallya.

“A section of employees of Kingfisher Airlines has not been reporting for work over the last fortnight, and over the past two days, they have been threatening and even manhandling the other employees who are reporting for work,” the Kingfisher spokesman, Prakash Mirpuri, said in a news release.

All Kingfisher flights scheduled to depart from the Delhi airport until 4:30 p.m. were canceled, the airport's Web site showed.

The Mint newspaper reported that the airline's ground staff had refused to attach an air bridge to a plane in Mumbai on Sunday, stranding passengers onboard, while some engineers beat up an executive. A company spokesman was not immediately available to comment on the report.

It was the first reported instance of employee violence at Kingfisher, which has not paid salaries for months and is under the constant watch of regulators, the tax authorities and banks.

Kingfisher is saddled with $1.4 billion in debt and has grounded most of its fleet. Banks have refused to lend it more money.

Last week, its creditors held inconclusive talks about the carrier's turnaround plan and will meet again this month.

Last month, India decided to allow foreign airlines to buy stakes of as much as 49 percent in Indian carriers, a long-awaited policy move that Kingfisher had lobbied hard for. Such investment could provide a lifeline to the country's debt-laden airlines.

No carrier has publicly expressed interest in buying a stake in Kingfisher, but Mr. Mallya, the chairman, told shareholders last Wednesday that he was in talks with foreign carriers about investing. He has made similar comments during the past year without any concrete developments.

Kingfisher shares dropped 5 percent to 15.35 rupees, or 29 cents, on the National Stock Exchange. The stock hit a lifetime low of 7.05 rupees in mid-August.



The Road to the Schoolhouse Proves Perilous for India\'s Young

NEW DELHI - On the day Japneet Singh died, his father dressed him neatly in his crisp school uniform for picture day at his nursery school. At school, Japneet, 4, smiled shyly for the camera. But he never made it home.

That afternoon, when Japneet's grandfather arrived to pick him up at the bus stop, he found him lying on the roadside in a pool of blood. Japneet's schoolbooks were scattered on the ground, and his brother, Parmeet, was kneeling beside Japneet's crumpled body, shaking him.

“Get up, Cherry!” Parmeet implored, calling his brother by his nickname. “Get up!”

Such scenes have become all too familiar in , which leads the world in total traffic fatalities. A startling number of the victims are schoolchildren.

Horrific school bus accidents occur with alarming regularity. At least 14 students died and 21 were injured in March when a school bus plunged into a canal in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh. In July, one student died and dozens were injured when their bus fell into a gorge in Kashmir. And often the accidents are like the one that killed Japneet - he exited the bus and was crushed beneath its wheels.

Experts attribute the accidents to a deadly combination of bad roads, chaotic traffic, poorly enforced safeguards, badly trained bus drivers and a lack of political will to address the problem. Safety analysts also say that the Indian public has failed to demand safer services.

“There is no public anger,” said Harman S. Sidhu, president of ArriveSafe, a nonprofit group focused on improving road safety in India. “It's accepted as part of India's road crashes.”

In any Indian city or village, schoolchildren can be seen hunched under heavy backpacks in matching uniforms, dodging traffic as they walk to or from school or a bus stop. India's school enrollment has exploded as the country's economy has taken off, with elementary schools alone adding about 34 million children in the past eight years. But the number of vehicles tearing through India's roads has increased even more sharply, doubling to 74 million vehicles in the same period. More than 14 million were added last year alone.

This combination of more students and more cars has resulted in far more accidents. No statistics are available on school bus accidents or deaths, but overall traffic fatalities have markedly risen during the past decade. Nearly 134,000 Indians were killed in traffic accidents in 2010, the most recent year for which government figures are available.

For many children, the journey to school is often filled with hazards. Roads are poorly planned and rarely maintained. Only half are paved. Drivers often lack much formal training and recklessly navigate through choked city streets. Crosswalks, road signs and even sidewalks may be missing.

Fifteen years ago, India enacted its first laws regulating school bus safety, after a Supreme Court judgment demanded, among other guidelines, that buses have doors that can open and close, a mechanical device to limit the vehicle's speed, a qualified conductor and an experienced, law-abiding driver.

“Now it's a question of enforcement,” said Mahesh Chander Mehta, the lawyer who filed the case, noting that existing regulations are often ignored. “The laws are there. But all over the country awareness is lacking.”

Ameeta Mulla Wattal, vice chairwoman of the National Progressive School Conference, a coalition of 130 schools, said the lack of enforcement was compounded by a lack of punishment after an accident occurs. “I'm sure there are hundreds and thousands of schools that don't follow it,” Ms. Wattal said of the guidelines. She said that more stringent rules were needed to address matters like the overcrowding of school buses, which are currently allowed to be stuffed to one and a half times their capacity.

Bus operators do this to save money, Ms. Wattal said. “This should be contested,” she said. “It is ridiculous.”

Safety analysts emphasize the need for government action but argue that the onus is also on schools, which need to take safety more seriously. Many schools collect transportation fees from students and then contract with a private bus operator to provide the services.

“If there's a crash, the school management passes on the responsibility to the bus driver and operator,” said Mr. Sidhu, president of ArriveSafe. “They pass the buck.”

This year, officials in the western state of Maharashtra introduced measures to address a spate of bus accidents. The new proposals called for tougher rules for the licensing of operators, the replacement of older buses and stricter enforcement to ensure the installation of devices that limit speed. In response, an association of school bus owners, complaining of higher costs and calling the measures impractical, staged a strike.

Moreover, school buses are only part of the scrambled student transportation network. In the New Delhi metropolitan area alone, several thousand students cram into vans, euphemistically referred to as school “cabs.” Others across India are ferried in auto-rickshaws, a popular three-wheel vehicle in the country that has no doors, with children often spilling from the sides.

Arvinder Singh, the father of the boy killed by his school bus, said he had thought the school bus was a safer option than the vans and auto-rickshaws. Yet, school and government officials were callous and apathetic, he said, when he looked to hold someone accountable after Japneet's death.

“I handed over my child to them,” Mr. Singh said on the first anniversary of his son's death last month. “It's basically a trust we give to the school that they'll keep our children safe.”

The school bus driver was arrested, and the case is now in court. Mr. Singh said that the school had offered him about $5,400 but that he had refused the money, saying he wanted justice. “I have lost my child,” said Mr. Singh, who plans to start a nonprofit group committed to child safety. “I know he won't come back to us. But I don't want other parents to suffer like I have.”



Ikea Apologizes for Removing Women From Saudi Catalog

By JENNIFER PRESTON

Ikea, the furniture retail giant, has issued an apology after a Swedish newspaper reported Monday that the company had removed women from some photographs for its catalog in Saudi Arabia.

Images of women that appear in versions of the catalog, published in 27 languages in 37 other countries, were erased in the edition for customers in Saudi Arabia. This prompted an outcry over the company's approach to gender inequality that began in Sweden and then spread around the world on social media platforms with thousands of mentions on Twitter alone in the last day.

Birgitta Ohlsson, the Swedish Minister for European Union Affairs who describes herself as a feminist in her Twitter profile, tweeted in Swe dish the move was “medieval.”

Conversations about whether Ikea was bowing to pressure from the conservative Islamic state or adapting to the country's cultural sensibilities took place around the world on social media platforms, including this exchange on Twitter between a journalist and a teenager in Canada.

In Saudi Arabia, women are not currently allowed to vote, hold high political office or drive. The country's treatment of women is widely criticized, which is why supporters of women's rights were troubled by Ikea's move.

In its statement, a company spokesman said that it regretted the decision. And it noted that the decision to edit the women out of the images was not made by the local franchise owner in Saudi Arabia, where there are three Ikea stores.

“It is not the local franchisee that has requested the retouch of the discussed pictures,” according to the statement issued by Inter Ikea Group. “We will naturally review our routines and working process to ensure that this will not happen again.”

On Tumblr, the incident inspired a meme of photos with women airbrushed out, including a n image of Disney's Seven Dwarfs without Snow White.



Supreme Court to Investigate Police Killings in Manipur

By HARI KUMAR

India's Supreme Court appointed on Monday an independent investigator to look into allegations that security forces in Manipur summarily executed people, after a human rights group documented 1,528 cases of extrajudicial killings in the state over the past five years.

The lead plaintiff in the petition filed with the Supreme Court is Neena Ningombam, whose husband, Nongmaithem Michael Singh, was picked up by state security forces in November 2008 and was killed a few hours later. Security forces said he was a terrorist and was killed while he was throwing grenades, but Ms. Ningombam said her husband was innocent.

Ms. Ningombam, 33, who now supports their two sons, ages 5 and 10, said that she spent thr ee years filing petitions to different agencies trying to clear her husband's name. Along the way, she met many families whose relatives were killed by the Manipur police under questionable circumstances. Together, these families formed the Extrajudicial Victim Families Association, Manipur, with Ms. Ningombam as its secretary, and brought the lawsuit before the Supreme Court.

In July, a district judge appointed by the Guwahati High Court sided with Ms. Ningombam, concluding that Mr. Singh had not attacked the police when he was killed. The Guwahati High Court has not issued any sentence in the case or charges against the police.

In total, the families' organization has gathered details of 1,528 extrajudicial killings and compiled detailed documents in 63 cases for its Supreme Court filing. On Monday, Supreme Court appointed Menaka Guruswamy as the amicus curiae, or friend of the court, to submit a report in four months after an inves tigation.

“I am hopeful to get justice from the Supreme Court,” said Ms. Ningombam in an interview after the court order. “It seems that the judge took the matter seriously. We hope that something positive will come out of this.”

Babloo Loitongbam of Manipur's Human Right Alert, an organization fighting for civil rights in Manipur, criticized the Guwahati High Court for its delays in charging the police officers, saying, “The criminal justice system in Manipur has failed in protecting the right of life.” Mr. Loitongbam helped the victim families' group in filing the petition with the Supreme Court.

Colin Gonsalves, the organization's advocate in the Supreme Court, said in a telephone interview that the Guwahati High Court should have been more active in taking these cases. “Why is the High Court oblivious of what is happening?” he said.